Investing in the workers who are transforming our world.

Our system is in crisis.

A Crisis of Inequality

In what is being called “The Great Divide”, we are facing an historic chasm of inequality that defies common understanding. Since 2008, the number of billionaires in the world has doubled, and yet a quarter of Americans have less than $10 to their name. In the globe as a whole, a mere eighty people own as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, more than half the world combined. The drive for profit has become the extraction from the many for the benefit of the few. Sources: [a], [b], [c], [d]

A Crisis of Exclusion

History books used to teach that the economic effects of racism were in the past, but we are finally facing the truth that the wealth and income divide is happening along racial and ethnic lines. Despite decades of civil rights activism, people of color continue to face extreme economic exclusion, and income and wealth inequality between whites and other races has largely remained unchanged and even increased in recent years. Sources: [a], [b], [c]

A Crisis of Extraction

We are faced with the destruction of our planet in way never before known in history. Scientists have sounded the alarm that our economic activity is having an extremely dangerous effect on the climate, and yet despite decades of awareness, we have remained unable to change, and the crisis has only continued to deepen. The drive for short-term profit is literally destroying our chances for long-term survival. Sources: [a], [b], [c]

These historic crises have a common root: the extractive economy

Our system makes profit for a few by extracting from people and planet.

We can transform this into a democratic economy which is built to serve the needs of people and the communities they live in.

Here’s how we do it:

1. Recreate Finance

Finance is the engine that drives our economy, and it is the place to begin transforming it. We recreate finance so it is a tool for the benefit of people and planet, rather than using people and planet as a tool to make profit. The Working World has made over a thousand successful investments into people and has never extracted a penny.

3. Put People in Charge

When communities control resources, they care for them, and our society and our planet can be stewarded for generations to come when the people are in charge. We have worked with hundreds of worker and community owned businesses across the globe that build wealth and use it to meet the needs of people, and more are created every day.

4. Grow virally and transform the world

People create their own jobs, build their own economic power, and steward their own communities. As projects are successful, investments are repaid and money and knowledge are shared with new communities, allowing the whole system to spread like a network and allow local control to go global.

How can any organization change the world? It can’t — but people can. The hardest part of any plan is who will execute it. In our plan to transform the economy, we all do it together.

“People say to me they don’t think us workers can be owners. But I say to them, believe it, because here we are. Now that we’ve done this, who knows what’s possible.” — Arizona Stingley, New Era Windows Cooperative